At our weekly stand up my boss always says he’s working on “HR stuff”. I only ever see or hear from him in team meetings. Wtf do these people even do that justifies their high salaries?
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I do this “job.” I manage managers. Most of the time, your sentiment is entirely correct — we’re useless. We don’t have to be, though.
My previous boss made it his life mission to find every bit of pointless, time wasting nonsense that came from above and shield us from it so we could do our actual jobs. A lot of people didn’t realize he was doing it until he was promoted and left.
I spend most of my time finding ways to automate away boring things my employees do manually, so they can spend more time on the interesting parts of their jobs. I also spend a lot of time finding and getting funds for development and training they want so they can grow their careers. The rest of it is spent advocating for resources to the people that control them, hiring new people, and explaining what my people do to folks who are probably too dumb to understand it.
Your boss is probably useless. Most of us are. If you ever find yourself taking his place, remember how useless he was and how the value in your office is generated by the people who make things, not the people who “manage” them.
As a middle manager, my purpose is to mange the employees under me, as upper management can’t possibly manage that man individual contributors. My time is primarily used to identify and resolve blockers or challenges that could prevent my team from hitting their goals. And then report on my teams performance all the time. And try to keep people from pestering people on my team so they can get actual work done. But then I have to do other “HR” stuff too, like creating and performing quarterly reviews, hiring and firing, one on ones, etc… I can’t speak for the middle managers at your company, but I am constantly jumping from one thing to the next… It is tiring. I get to deal with all the sh!t and pass all the accolades on to the individual performers on my team that get things done.
That’s what middle managers are supposed to do, unfortunately most are just nepotism hires.
Often times it’s reporting on the employees below them and their performance through whichever metrics are available. A solution without a problem most of the time.